Koichi Nishiyama
I have written about "photographs" and “art works” many times at the request of other people. At first, I didn't understand the reason for putting it into words and couldn't express my thoughts and feelings in a satisfying way. But it motivated me to take new pictures, so I think that this experience was very helpful.
I started to take pictures at a certain moment because I had a camera. But I had little awareness of what is an “art work”. Even so, I kept doing it. I had a feeling that if I collect photographs and give them a title it will become an “art work” and if I show it to someone, something important may come out. While continuing my shooting experience I started designing spaces, then by gathering people I created opportunities for exhibitions. As a result of my exploration of the context of space, my expression has taken different forms. Perhaps I am shifting the boundaries between "personal experience," "work," "artist," and "photographer" to question each notion.
Since my childhood I did not know what to do with the feeling of ambiguity about the outside world. The camera helped me to express myself in a desperate attempt to close the gap between the external reality and the self, to think once again about the “exhibition” that is held in a limited time in a limited space and my own rampantly multiplying thoughts and the system of reality.
Photos that look exactly like reality, and yet are always different from it, amaze me. I keep making something new out of that similarity because it seems to reconcile my feeling of strangeness with the world.
not to disappear
This building was previously called “Hagisou”. It stains the story of lives, has various look of joy and sadness.
And It will live with things happening in and about and the future will be well off.
In this work, a little change was made to things in here, just like letting fresh air into the room.
In that wealthiness, I thought I could reach out a structure or how the space formed by changing the transparent viewpoint There could be something in common between our lives like adoring someone special who doesn’t exist.
architectural photography
I took a photograph of buildings in a residential area on the outskirts of Tokyo where I live.
Buildings are something familiar and reticent. That was the perfect subject to reconsider the experience of.
I’ve been trying to find some sort of relevance from the collection of plane images but then I realized that I have to reconstruct the method, using photographic images, to approach “seeing by light” . To deviate from the photo frame became the turning point in my work.
After a continuous trial and error, I then gain a sequence to space approaching buildings, the subject of this work.
nowhere
There was a forest near the house where I lived when I was a child.
When the forest existed, I felt a connection with a deep part in the world there.
However, the forest was destroyed in the long term, and only the process of the loss and its memory were kept in my mind.
I am living in a place which is a little distant from there at the present day.
When I look at the scenery in the periphery of the city where I live, I can see a new contemporary scenery which overlaps with the past scenery.
I keep walking and roaming around the place until it leads me to my destination.
And the subdued light is shining on the space which illuminates my memory of the past.
At that time, I realized that I can regain the connection with the world.
"Ambiguity"
12 September - 4 October, 2019